Naked ape: Nénette the orang-utan enthralls Paris

A cantankerous, elderly orang-utan in a Paris zoo is the surprise star of a
new documentary that raises questions about the behaviour of animals,
including humans.

Nénette in her enclosurePhoto: Christian Kain

By Murphy Williams

7:00AM GMT 01 Feb 2011

A mile east along the Seine from Nôtre Dame cathedral in the heart of Paris, the shiny modern institutes that line this strip of the Left Bank give way to the stately splendour of Le Jardin des Plantes, France's main botanical garden, founded in 1626 as 'Le Jardin du Roi'.

In 1794, during the French Revolution, a third of its 70 acres were designated to receive the royal collection of animals from Versailles. The Ménagerie is one of the world's oldest public zoos, home to 1,000 animals, among them four orang-utans, of which Nénette, at 40, is the oldest in captivity.

With visitors deterred by the sharp winter wind tearing through its ancient trees, the place has a distinct melancholy about it, lifted only by troupes of trilling French schoolchildren struggling to stay in line. The highlight of the Ménagerie for them is the singerie, the monkey house, where Nénette is usually curled up into a hairy red ball.

It is perhaps this lack of 'monkey-like' antics that makes Nénette so charismatic. Some locals return for weekly visits.

One was recently seen prostrating herself before the unimpressed veteran. While she may have long been the star of the Ménagerie to Parisians, her extraordinary face, inscrutable despite its rubbery permutations, may soon be familiar around the world, thanks to a stirring, narrative-free, low-budget film by the award-winning documentary maker Nicolas Philibert, shot almost entirely in claustrophobic close-up.

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Nénette started life as a 15-minute short. 'I've known this menagerie for a long time,' Philibert says, 'but I came only occasionally, and then just over a year ago, I came here for a walk one day when I had time to kill. I went into the monkey house and I stopped in front of the orang-utans, and stayed for nearly two hours, both watching the animals and listening to the visitors' comments.'

He noticed that although orang-utans, the largest arboreal animals, are among the most intelligent primates and use sophisticated tools, people often come to mock them and giggle. 'But they are soon gripped by something else, by a sort of gravity,' he says. 'One senses that it concerns us. They are close to us, and we are in the process of making them disappear.' The idea for the film came then, spontaneously, and part of the idea was that it that would 'involve a complete disjunction between sound and image. One would see Nénette without hearing her, and one would hear the humans without ever seeing them.'

Philibert was born in Nancy, north-eastern France in 1951, and raised in alpine Grenoble. His early career included various mountaineering and sports adventure films for television, and in 1990 he made Louvre City, the first of his unassuming, often comical, fly-on-the-wall documentaries to get a theatrical release.

There followed features set among the deaf (In the Land of the Deaf, 1992), in the zoology gallery of the National Natural History Museum in Paris (Animals, 1996), in a psychiatric unit (EveryLittle Thing, 1997) and among a group of drama students (Who Knows? 1999). All were distinguished by a relish for the apparently mundane and a warm respect for its subjects.

Then something extraordinary happened: Etre et Avoir (To Be and To Have, 2002), a graceful, never cloying, study of the dramas of growing up, shot in a single-class mountain village school, became France's most successful documentary and a global success.

It took Philibert on promotional duties to 40 countries and made an estimated £14 million. Apart from the resulting (swiftly rejected) offers that came his way to make commercials and 'To Be and To Have 2', the film led to years of ongoing lawsuits, most notoriously by the schoolteacher, who claimed a share of the profits (and lost in court), and most absurdly by an artist who had drawn the ABC chart on the classroom wall, and, despite losing his suit for £210,000, is trying to take his case to the France's highest court. It has been hard for the filmmaker, who believed the teacher to be 'very honest and rigorous. The one who appeared in court was completely different to the man I filmed.' Yet Philibert is as resolute as ever.

Nénette was a simple film to make after the many criss-crossing layers and narrative devices of Philibert's last, intensely personal film, Return to Normandy (2007). The only challenges he encountered were finding the right spot from which to film. 'I had to be patient because Nénette often spent three hours hiding under her straw. Sometimes she would put herself somewhere and when I tried to film, the glass before her would have big scratches on it.'

Why did Philibert choose Nénette over the three other orang-utans, Nénette's son, Tubo, or Theodora and her daughter, Tamu? 'Of the four, she touched me most; I think that's because she's been here for 38 years, and has lived through a lot. She is slightly removed, unlike the others, who come towards the glass. Maybe it's because she was the only one born at large in Borneo [she arrived in 1972, at the age of three], so she grew up in the trees. I admired this little distance that she keeps from us.'

The zookeepers are convinced that Nénette understood she was being filmed. 'Usually when she sees a camera, even mine, she hides,' sighs Cristelle Hano, who is the co-chief zookeeper (along with Gérard Dousseau). 'Nénette doesn't always come down to ground level, but if Nicolas visits, she comes right up to the glass. He came to take some photos last summer, and there was Nénette, posing on her rope, so Nicolas got magnificent pictures. I work here and mine aren't nearly as good.'

Philibert managed this by spending time, remaining passive, tranquil and focused on her, with and without his camera. 'Few fix for so long on Nénette,' Dousseau says. 'For the public, Nénette is no longer the star these days, clearly.'

As a documentary, Nénette is a bold, poetic departure from the conventional approach, in which one would show the caretaking of the monkeys, their context, how they feed and wash themselves. As the son of a philosophy professor and a former philosophy major himself, Philibert is always keen to escape the straitjacket of his 'subjects', which he sees as an excuse to explore human nature.

Philibert was never tempted to gain access beyond the glass. 'I always wanted to make the film from the viewpoint of the visitors. The film's subject is this glass as well. It protects us, but also allows us to get closer. It is both barrier and mirror, a transparent surface behind which is this ball of hair, on to which people project themselves. The film is about us as much as Nénette.'

Philibert has the advantage of an unimposing appearance, anonymous even in his anorak and jeans, as well as a soft voice and a gentle, kindly demeanour. For Nénette, Philibert spent 10 non-consecutive days at the monkey house, shooting about an hour of life within the enclosure each time.

He also recorded 20 hours of quoted texts by the Comte de Buffon, the 18th-century naturalist and director of the Jardin; interviews with the zookeepers; improvised reflections from an actor friend ('She is drained by curiosity… she's like a kept woman, a hairy one. A victim of her own rarity'); and public reactions, caught on a recorder that Philibert put near the glass.

When a sound engineer friend was free, he would help out with more professional equipment. After each day, Philibert would build aural sequences in the editing suite, and find film clips to match. Intricate passages were cut with less active clips of the monkeys, and vice-versa.

'I think she's totally depressed,' says a frail-sounding woman. Two artists chat as they sketch her: 'You need to seize the essence with animals, or you waste time trying to do a pretty drawing. Nénette is a real joy to work with, look at her mass, her volume moving like that.'

At the end of the day, a whistle blows before the clunky door slams one last time and the lights are put out. The overriding impression is of Nénette's mind-numbing boredom. 'That's what we hear all the time,' Hano says. 'We explain that they are passive, tranquil animals. We'd know if they were depressed.'

In a country where philosophers are as revered as footballers are here, eloquence and erudition are part of the national make-up, and accordingly, Nénette's keepers, or soigneurs, speak with striking clarity of their charge.

'When I started 11 years ago in the monkey house, Nénette was the bane of the place,' Hano says. 'We simply couldn't budge her if she didn't feel like it. We didn't call her "Nénette", but other, not very nice names, I confess.' It was only when Nénette underwent major surgery for an abscess that Hano felt a bond. 'I realised I was scared of losing her. That's when I saw in her eyes that she could be gentle. I'd always heard you could tell her mood by her eyes but I had never seen that. Perhaps I'd never thought about it. But we had to be careful around her. In six years I never touched Nénette. Now she's the one who offers to let me touch her by holding out her fingers or mouth through the wire. She can be tricky, but she's old so she needs time to be comfortable.'

Over the years, the keepers have seen her through a longer life than most orang-utans, who usually die at about 35. She was 'a goddess' when cameras turned up to film her with her first baby. She then had three more, of which were two taken elsewhere and one died of a heart attack; she survived three mates and three days under anaesthetic, and now has suspected arthritis. Even so, she is still considered the most dangerous of the four.

Dousseau, who has the 'grand honour' of having spent his 36-year career working with her, is sure that Nénette sees him as 'an adoptive father'. She lets him into her cage, but this happens only rarely: when she was giving birth or needs medicine. Two former keepers, lacking Dousseau's authority over Nénette, have been badly hurt.

'Two baby orang-utans arrived,' Dousseau says, 'and as Nénette was such a good mother, the zoo decided she should look after them, while we would go in and give them a daily bottle of milk. So we quickly set up a programme for Nénette to get used to a certain amount of contact with the keepers, but one new girl failed to follow the procedures. She was alone for a while, and decided to go in with Nénette, who was pleased by the contact. After 15 minutes she wanted to leave but each time she tried to make Nénette let go of her she refused. The keeper panicked and shouted. She tried to force her way out, but Nénette was stronger, and then she bit. It could have been worse, but she ended up with 40 stitches on her back and shoulder. On another occasion, a zookeeper put two pots of yogurt meant for a baby too close to Nénette, who ate one. When he tried to retrieve the other, she grabbed his hand and bit it very, very nastily.'

While the film may show Nénette's daily routine – her adroit yogurt-eating, tea-drinking from a plastic bottle and straw-bed making – the nuances of her occasionally doleful, highly observant, cantankerous and tender personality are kept for those who come into close contact with her. 'How she behaves with us is not the same,' Hano says.

'Those lucky enough to come into the corridor [from where they tend to the animals] see how much closer you can get through the wire fence than through the glass. The eyes change, the smell too.'

Both Hano and Dousseau applaud Philibert's originality in focusing visually simply on Nénette, and are tuned in to Philibert's intentions in making his film. 'What interests me,' Philibert says, 'is to uncover questions, not to bring answers or preach. I make films starting from my ignorance, but with a desire to understand. So I don't read books beforehand, I don't consult experts, but during the process of the film, I listen and learn and invent the film as I go along. It's much more amusing that way. At the end of the film, one has learnt a few things about Nénette, but the mystery remains, like the Mona Lisa.'

About 33,000 orang-utans, a critically endangered species, remain, on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo. This 'man of the forest' as its name means in Malay, and which Walt Disney depicted as the 'jungle VIP' in the film of The Jungle Book, is threatened with annihilation largely because of the conversion in the past decade of vast areas of tropical forest to oil palm plantations. Ironically, palm oil is in increasing demand as a source of environmentally friendly biodiesel.

Not least because it has increased attendance by 20 per cent this year, the Ménagerie's director, Michel Saint-Jalme, is equally appreciative of Philibert's film, despite its ambiguities. 'Deep down it troubles us to have these animals locked up here,' he says. 'But it may perhaps save them. They could become extinct in the next 15 years, but for the moment, the international community is impotent, partly because palm oil is linked to the economic development of the country. For us, the film has forced the issue of improving conditions for these animals. We are trying to raise finances to redo this monkey house, which is a bit old [it dates from 1934] and inappropriate. It will be difficult because the Ménagerie is listed as a historic monument, but we'll fight on.'

What with the heavy clanking door, the pitiful, deep scratches on the enclosure's institutionally white walls, and the lack of much space or time outdoors, the caretakers know that the monkey house comes across as 'a pretty incarcerated universe' in the film. 'We realised that there were quite a few things to improve while waiting to renovate the singerie,' Hano says. 'I can't stand the sound of that door, for a start.' They are hoping the film will help them raise the £12 million needed for an ambitious project that would include an outdoor space where the public would be separated from the orang-utans only by water.

For now, a fresh coat of pale-green paint in the monkey house covers over the scratches. But Philibert doesn't care for it. What he cares about are the discussions the film has triggered around the cinemas of France, the more lateral the better.

'You sometimes have only 40 spectators and then there's a priceless debate afterwards. They speak of cinema and the art of projection – since it is a film that follows the concept of projection to the letter. The text by Buffon describes orang-utans as both very refined – capable of serving themselves tea, using a knife and fork, putting a napkin around their necks to eat – and at the same time as monsters who kidnap babies and rape women. It is described as both close and different, both civil and monstrous. This fear of "difference" in our fellow creatures brings us to the question of racism as well.'

The making of Nénette has been a 'beautiful adventure' for Philibert. As soon as it was finished, on a budget of about £50,000, a distributor asked to screen it; then the jury at the Berlin Film Festival selected it; it was sold to French television; now it has been sold to 10 countries around the world, to show at various festivals; and soon it will come out on DVD. None of which was anticipated.

During the making of the film, one intriguing question arose: what would Nénette make of it? So a 6ft screen was set in front of the glass, at an angle so that Nénette's reactions to Nénette could be monitored and filmed. The keepers had long wondered whether films might entertain the orang-utans anyway.

Before long, though, Tubo became frightened. To him, the animal on screen was a gigantic rival, especially during the close-ups. Tubo threw plastic barrels around in a panic, banged into walls, tossed fruit about, and made the deep resounding call so rarely heard within a zoo. 'There was an astonishing moment,' Philibert says, 'when Tubo hid behind Nénette, for the first time, even though he is twice her size.'

Hano went to reassure him and the screen was reduced to 30in. Tubo remained suspicious but the panic abated. Tamu was so relaxed she fell asleep; Theodora watched right to the end ('We're getting her a membership for the Cinémathèque Française,' Dousseau says); and Nénette? 'She came and looked,' Hano says, 'and checked out what Philibert and the others were up to. I don't know if she was really very interested, because that's hard to say.'